Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  “On the other hand, you know, you had to say to yourself, ‘The guy is a gangster and a con man. And you can’t get too close to him, or too friendly with him.’”

  * * *

  Wiseguy was a chance for Hill to come clean, but it was also a hustle for him. In addition to what Simon and Schuster, the publisher of the book, paid author Nicholas Pileggi, it had agreed to award Hill almost $100,000 for story rights. But the publisher was stymied by New York’s so-called “Son of Sam” laws, named after the infamous serial killer of the late ’70s. These statutes were designed to prevent criminals from “profiting” from their crimes via books, film rights, and so on. When Simon and Schuster moved to pay Hill royalties he accrued from Wiseguy sales—about $30,000—they were hence enjoined. Simon and Schuster sued, not just for Hill’s sake, but for the larger principle. The publisher’s case got all the way to the Supreme Court. Which resolved in Simon and Schuster’s favor, allowing Hill to collect the funds. This cleared the path for Hill to pursue more book money with new projects.

  Pileggi remembered the time prior to Hill’s coming out, prior to their collaboration. “He couldn’t not spend money. And he couldn’t not get into schemes that ended up being total busts. He once bought a vintage trolley car in St. Louis, or in Kentucky, I can’t remember. And he was going to conduct tours on it. A total bust. And then he would need money. He’d call and say, ‘I need money, I need money.’ It turns out he ‘needed’ money because he wanted $7,000 to buy his daughter a pony.”

  That pony was named Bananas, and Hill bought the animal during his family’s stay in Kentucky, for Gina, a passionate rider. When the family was relocated from Kentucky to Washington state, Hill contrived to have the animal shipped to them. Gina had no idea how. (Prior to Kentucky, the Hills had been in Omaha, Nebraska.)

  The lure of criminality remained strong, despite the fact that one feature of witness protection was near-constant surveillance, or at least monitoring, by law enforcement.

  “He rationalized living this way because around the corner he was gonna make a $50,000 score on a coke deal,” Pileggi recalls, still wryly incredulous to this day. “He was being watched by the FBI twenty-four hours a day, and it didn’t occur to him that he might not get away with such a thing. There was no consequence. He didn’t understand how vulnerable he was. And I had talked to him about that, and his position was, ‘Look, if I had to worry about every single thing, I would never have done anything.’”

  Gina Hill writes, “Whatever money my dad got from the book was spent as soon as he got it.” Gregg writes, “My father had an angle for everything. If there was a way to make a buck off a situation, he’d figure it out. And it was easy for him to pull it off because he never thought about or cared about the consequences. Plus, he had no shame.”

  In 1987 Hill was arrested for conspiracy to sell narcotics. At this point in time his family life was convoluted. Another woman had entered his life—referred to as Dawn in the account by Gregg and Gina, called Kelly Norblatt (presumably her real name) in Hill’s Gangsters and Goodfellas. The movie hadn’t happened yet, but the book had, and Henry had a kind of local celebrity, which also trickled down to Gina, who couldn’t stand it. “Henry Hill had become a famous character,” Gina wrote, “not even a real gangster anymore who inspired fear and dread. Strangers felt free to harass [me] in coffee shops. I was right about his being protected, though. The government didn’t rescue him, but things always seemed to work out for my father. When he went to trial in September 1987, his lawyer argued that my father was actually a victim. The stress of witness protection, of being far from familiar places and constantly fearing for his life, led to drug and alcohol problems, which in turn caused his marriage to fall apart. The only reason he got involved with the conspiracy to sell cocaine, his lawyer said, was because he owed those drug dealers so much money that they were threatening him and molesting Dawn [Kelly]. ‘He was scared,’ the lawyer said. It worked, sort of. My father was convicted, but the judge sentenced him to five years’ probation. As long as he stayed out of trouble, he’d stay out of trouble.”

  The making of Goodfellas and its subsequent release only led to more of the limelight, but it also provided a kind of bubble. “The truth is, if it hadn’t been for Ed McDonald and Nick Pileggi, I’d have been twenty years in the ground already,” Hill writes in Gangsters and Goodfellas. These guardian angels got Hill into the public spotlight, and one of them got him paid, too. Hill could luxuriate at least a little in the idea that these two genuinely good fellows had his back, up to a point. And there was more. “When I signed on the deal for Goodfellas, in 1989, Scorsese sent me a check, two weeks before principal photography, for $480,000. The feds didn’t even know it. They knew about it, but not the amount. Scorsese made sure I got the check privately—that was also part of the deal.”

  Hill’s account of other wiseguy survivors trying to get a piece of the action is amusing: “Just as we started gearing up to film GoodFellas, Jimmy Burke’s fearsome daughter Cathy reared her ugly head. She tried to shake down De Niro for one hundred large to give him the right to use the name ‘Burke.’ We said, ‘Fuck her, we’ll change the name.’ That’s why the name is Jimmy Conway in the movie. Thank God this happened before they filmed all the Burke scenes.”

  Hill does not turn up in the production credits of Goodfellas, even as a consultant, but he arguably earned that half mil. “During this whole process I really came to respect De Niro. I was never much for celebrity worship, which is like a disease out here”—Hill was writing from Topanga, where he spent his last years; the town is close enough to Hollywood to pass for “out here”—“but De Niro was special. He was so intense about getting Jimmy Burke down right that he had me coaching him all the time. I was getting ten phone calls a day from De Niro or Scorsese. My own phone bill was $4,000-plus a month, which Scorsese covered. And the calls came at all hours. When Kelly was in delivery, who should call me but Bobby De Niro. You should have seen it, my girl is giving birth, and while she’s yelling I’m trying to coach De Niro, who’s about to shoot a scene where somebody gets whacked. I’m telling Bobby how to pistol-whip a guy’s head at the same time my new kid’s head is popping out. You could say it ruined the moment.” (Joseph Reidy remembers that he was often the go-between for Hill and the filmmakers, and has a similar complaint about Hill: “Henry had my number. And unfortunately, he’d call me—you know, it’d be the landline in those days—call me at home at night, check in on how things are. And I had his number because once in a while Marty would ask me to call Henry about something.”)

  Hill, Kelly Norblatt, and their son, Justin, lived in Hollywood for much of the 1990s after the release of Goodfellas. “To be honest, the ’90s are a huge blur,” Hill wrote in Gangsters and Goodfellas. It was in Hollywood and Santa Monica that he first tried to make a go of working with recovery groups. But Hill was a chronic relapser, and it seemed he could only get a good amount of time under his belt under extreme conditions. He recounts two years in a sober living residence. In the early 2000s he moved to North Platte, Nebraska, where he opened a restaurant, a sort of coeval to his 2002 The Wiseguy Cookbook. He sought to get into e-commerce selling his “Sunday Gravy” on the internet. But he couldn’t keep away from substance abuse, and in a 2005 interview from a jail cell in his new hometown, he says his brief time in stir once again saved his life. “It gave me a chance to sober up and get my stuff together again and move forward.”

  Ed McDonald has an anecdote from that period. “So he calls me, he was living in North Platte, Nebraska, with a woman there, and she owned a restaurant. I think they called it the Goodfellas Restaurant, or Wiseguy Restaurant, something like that. And he says, ‘I’m gonna come to New York, and Howard Stern’s gonna have me on his show.’ And I say, ‘That’s great.’ He says, ‘I’d love to have dinner with you, I wanna have a New York steak.’ I say, ‘Sure, go to Smith and Wollensky’s.’” McDonald is still a habitué of the
legendary Manhattan steak house. “I go to Smith and Wollensky’s all the time, in fact I was there last night,” he told me in our interview.

  “I get there, like, at 8:30, and I’m walking in, and David Cone, the pitcher”—Cone played for both the Mets and the Yankees, and in 1999 had pitched the sixteenth perfect game in the professional history of the sport; at around this time he was close to his last hurrah with the Mets—“is standing at the front, by the entrance. I remember thinking that I couldn’t believe how short he was. In the meantime the maître d’ is saying, ‘Yeah, that’s Henry Hill over there.’ He was attracting some sort of attention. And I know the bartender, and he comes up to me and says, ‘There’s a guy here claims he’s Henry Hill.’ I say, ‘He is Henry Hill.’ And so here’s Henry, with his wife, an attractive woman, and the first thing he says is, ‘I gotta get a buckin’ bink, I gotta get a buckin’ bink.’”

  Hill had been in such a rush to catch his plane out of North Platte that he had neglected to bring his dentures with him. “He’s on his third martini in, like, twenty minutes. And he’s making a scene, still wants another ‘buckin’ bink.’ I give my credit card to the waiter, and I said, ‘Just get me a shrimp cocktail and get them, you know, what they want.’ So, I had got my shrimp cocktail, the woman orders, like, a big T-bone steak. Which Henry can’t partake in because of his toothless state. He ended up with creamed spinach.”

  It was around this time, too, that McDonald and Hill got together in Burbank, at a recording studio at Warner Brothers, to record their Goodfellas commentary, one of several included on an anniversary edition of the home video version. The recording date was June 10, 2002, one day before Henry’s fifty-ninth birthday and the day that John Gotti died in prison.

  Throughout that commentary, Hill profusely, you might even say obsequiously, thanks McDonald for saving his life. Watching things like the stabbing of Billy Batts in the trunk, Hill almost shudders, and speaks of how he can’t believe that it was he who was involved in such brutality, and how bad he feels about it. It gets to be a bit much. McDonald allows that it indeed was. “I certainly don’t think Henry was remorseful. I never encountered that with him in any way. I don’t think that he was sincere. As much as I liked him, you know, I liked him with my eyes open. If he hadn’t been caught, you know, he wouldn’t have gone through witness protection program. This wasn’t like he got a conscience and had a ‘Saint Paul on the road to Damascus’ conversion. I never felt that about Henry at all.”

  When the two men emerged into the sunlight, both found their mobile phones were inundated with messages. Various media representatives were calling McDonald and Hill for their reactions to John Gotti’s death. The two men played a brief game. Henry would say, “Sure, I’ll give you a comment, but you really ought to talk to this guy,” and hand his phone to McDonald. The former prosecutor in turn would say, “You really ought to talk to Henry Hill. I have him right here.” Hill, working with the writer Daniel Simone, would tie Gotti into the Lufthansa heist (this is in Simone’s book, published a few years after Hill’s death). But at this point, Hill had mainly one thing to say about Gotti. “We had to go back to my hotel room,” McDonald recalls, “because we’re too far from where Henry was living, to be jointly interviewed in person. We were interviewed by the BBC. I remember this reporter with a plummy British accent asking, ‘Did you know John Gotti, and if so, what did you think of him?’ And Henry said, ‘Yes, I did know him,’ and the reporter says, ‘What was he like?’ and Henry says, ‘He was a fucking homicidal maniac. Excuse me, he was a homicidal maniac.’”

  * * *

  And it was during this time, his witness protection strictures long severed, that Hill got back in the book business. The Wiseguy Cookbook (2002) is a remarkably dense recipes-with-memoirs work. In its introduction, Hill hits on a familiar theme: “Try buying arugula in Omaha, Nebraska, or good Italian sausage in Butte, Montana.” A Goodfellas Guide to New York (2003) is a tour of his old world written with Bryon Scheckengrost, with whom Hill produced a short film during this period. Gangsters and Goodfellas followed in 2004.

  * * *

  In his 2019 book Coming Clean, introducing a partial transcript of a May 2002 interview, Howard Stern writes: “We first had him on the show back in the mid-’90s, and he’d been on three or four times since then. In those appearances, because Henry was an alcoholic and would come in drunk, we would just screw around with him and never get into any deep conversation.

  “This time he was drunk again. I’d been thinking more and more about Henry. How much of his substance abuse had been self-medicating, trying to drown the guilt of having done the unforgivable? How did he feel about killing people? Did he carry that around with him? Was there remorse? He might not be in a physical prison, but he was clearly in a mental one. He was in hell. I wanted to understand how he was feeling. I thought, ‘Let’s see if I can get him to be real with me. Let me see if I can get him to go there.’”

  In the transcript, Stern lightly chastises Hill for showing up with a can of Heineken—“You were doing so good”—and advises him to keep the swearing to a minimum (Stern’s show was still on the public airwaves at this time). A guy identifying as a mobster, calling himself “Paulie,” yet, calls Hill a rat, and Hill replies, “A happy rat.”

  “Is life so boring without alcohol?” Stern asks. “Yeah, it sucks,” Hill says. In a desultory fashion, Hill recounts several murders he claims to have committed (his tales got very tall as the years went on, and he needed to keep whatever interlocuter he had on the hook interested; hence, I believe, a story of Tommy DeSimone shooting a random guy in the face). Near the end of the conversation he says, “Howard, I am so miserable,” and “I’m a scumbag.”

  * * *

  Ed McDonald would hear from Hill on the phone every now and then in a specific circumstance. The former wiseguy would tell the man who did not put him in jail that he was sitting on the edge of the Santa Monica pier, about to throw himself off. Ray Liotta, who kept a certain distance from Hill during the shooting of Goodfellas, posed with Hill in a photo shoot in 2006. During that time Liotta advised Hill to check into a rehab, and Hill claimed he did so.

  * * *

  During the last ten years of his life Hill’s marriage to Norblatt dissolved, and he took up with Lisa Caserta, who would become his common-law wife and self-described manager. Caserta told me during one of our first phone conversations that Hill had been sober ten years when he died on June 12, 2012 (the day after his sixty-ninth birthday). It was Caserta who got Hill together with Daniel Simone to write The Lufthansa Heist, a novelistic and rather outlandish re-re-recounting of the affair, which was published in 2015.

  * * *

  Ed McDonald enjoyed playing himself in Goodfellas, to the extent that he kind of caught an acting bug, although the acting profession did not bite back. Some filmmaker friends did, around 2010, ask him to play a cameo in a film they were working on called Sinatra Club. Having had some recent contact with Hill, he thought it might be fun to bring the erstwhile gangster along. The movie was about a young John Gotti, and McDonald’s hunch was right: the moviemakers were so delighted to meet Hill that they gave him a bit part—as “MOB GUY” as it’s listed on the IMDb—on the spot. On the drive back from the location, Hill told McDonald that he considered the man his best friend. McDonald did not know quite what to say to that.

  Nine

  UNOFFICIAL NARRATIVES

  I first interviewed Barbara De Fina in May of 2019. De Fina is small-boned and gives an impression of shyness and modesty as soon as you meet her. This held throughout the actual interview. She had good memories of the making of Goodfellas, and told me about her background, working with Sidney Lumet, the affinities between Lumet and Scorsese, and more. She told me about her current project, an adaptation of Tommy James’ memoir Me, the Mob, and the Music, a rock ’n’ roll biopic with a strong crime element and a strong Oedipal one; much of the book details James’
twisted relationship with Morris Levy, the very mob-affiliated head of Roulette Records, the label that broke, and subsequently controlled, James.

  I was interested in the dynamic between De Fina and Scorsese—the fact that they married, divorced, but continued working together. De Fina has an executive producer credit on as recent a Scorsese movie as Silence. Their marriage had broken up around the time Goodfellas was made. For all that, I said I wasn’t going to delve too deeply into the personal lives of the filmmakers, at least beyond which factors of these had an effect on the making of this particular movie. Still, I probed. I tiptoed around the “why did the marriage break up” question and De Fina made a reference to demons, and how everyone had them. I mentioned that I was curious that when Jay Cocks gave Scorsese a copy of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, he told his friend Marty that the almost fatally scrupulous Newland Archer was the filmmaker, at least in certain ways. De Fina raised an eyebrow. “You’d have to ask Jay about that,” she said, practically incredulous.